My Favorite Reads of 2018

2018 has been an amazing year for books. This year, I read over 500 books and trying to narrow that list down was brutal. I have just read so many brilliant, life changing, blow me away, knock my socks off books. This year I was going to do a top 20, but I finished the year out with 21 amazing, can’t cut any of these books, reads. These 21 books have given me all the feels. They’ve made me laugh, cry, swoon and taken me on some of the best journeys ❤ I hope you enjoy my top 21 and the quotes I’ve pulled….

“This man had a stare unlike any stare. Equal parts intense and intimidating.”

“Rejection was one of the worst pains one could ever feel. Scars healed. Bruises went away. Rejection was lasting. It was a memory you could conjure up at any time and hurt from, over and over again. It never left you.”

“You put food in front of a starving man, he’s going to eat it. No matter what he thinks he deserves or not. It was about survival. And Shayla was keeping me alive.”

“I wanna be yours” “You at my back, stickin’ up for me, and there when I’m fuckin’ terrified…I wanna go to you and I want you tellin’ me I can. I wanna be your, Shayla.”

“In my mind, we were two asteroids orbiting around each other. I thought I was the sun and you were earth, but now I see I got it all mixed up. You were always the sun. And even now, when I look at you, I don’t see regret and pain and suffering. I see the biggest opportunity, the sweetest promise, the road I should be taking.”

“Once upon a time, a mere mortal fell in love with a rock god. You probably know this is not a fairy tale by now. Mortals and gods don’t mix.”

“I don’t want your yesterday. And would never expect your tomorrow. But if we can have today, I will show you what love tastes like. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll forget about all our sorrows.”

“You’d be a fool not to take her on.”

“I hired you to be in charge of my career but you’re not allowed to manage my heart.”

“One of the first shrinks I went to after Cass died told me that the brain has a hardwired need to find correlations, to make sense of nonsensical data by making connections between unrelated things. Humans have evolved a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information, hence the existence of fortune-tellers and dream interpreters and people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. But the cold, hard truth is that there are no connections between anything. Life—all of existence—is totally random. Your lucky lottery numbers aren’t really lucky, because there’s no such thing as luck. The black cat that crosses your path isn’t a bad omen, it’s just a cat out for a walk. An eclipse doesn’t mean that the gods are angry, just as a bus narrowly missing you as you cross the street doesn’t mean there’s a guardian angel looking out for you. There are no gods. There are no angels. Superstitions aren’t real, and no amount of wishing, praying, or rationalizing can change the fact that life is just one long sequence of random events that ultimately have no meaning. I really hated that shrink.”

“Come Zvezda,” he urges. “It’s time.” “What if I say I don’t want to?” His hand wavers, but he doesn’t retreat. “Then it would break my heart.” “I didn’t realise that you had a heart to break,” I whisper. “Even monsters have hearts, my sweet.”

“In that moment, I wondered. What. If. Two very dangerous words. Two horrible words. Words that should never be put together in any way, shape, or form.”

“He kissed me tenderly, he kissed me like he wanted to do nothing more than taste me for the next few hours and memorize every inch of my body.”

“I was keeping him. End of story.”

“I’d asked him to help me, begged him to save me, and he’d sent Jessie, not only to provide friendship and laughter when I needed it the most, but to gift me the joy of music. She’d delivered it straight into my arms, like a messenger bearing miracles, and I hadn’t once recognized her for what she was. My gift. My fate. My love.”

“Live fiercely and without regret.”

“Sometimes the beginning of love is just a simple matter of proximity.”

Transcend

“I was her now. She was my always. And I thought that would add up to forever.”

“The people in our lives give color to our existence. When we love, we choose to let part of our heart—part of our soul—live inside of another person. Their happiness is our happiness. Their grief is our grief. And when they die … part of us dies too.”

“A single touch can say things twenty-six letters can’t even begin to say.”

“You were this feeling inside of me that shook me to the core. It wasn’t any one thing—your looks, your words, your voice, your demeanor—it was all of it … or none of it. I still don’t know. I just felt like I’d arrived somehow. And I still feel it every fucking day.”

“We don’t love with our brains, we love with our hearts. We love on instinct. Love is undefinable and resides in all of us. There are no requirements to love someone. Daisy was my first love. Jenna was my last love. Morgan is my forever love.”

Epoch

“Don’t steal anything from the past or borrow anything from the future. Pay your dues today. That’s living life.”

“I think a part of you will be mine to love in every life.” The End”

“I don’t need you to love me back … in this lifetime.” He smiles. My eyes fill with tears. How can one sentence be so beautiful and so forlorn at the same time? I don’t need you to love me back … in this lifetime. Nate Hunt deserves to be loved back in every lifetime—especially this one.”

“It’s an innocent love. It’s a beautiful love. I think it’s even an eternal love. But … I don’t know yet. Maybe in another lifetime we’ll see. We’ll find out if our souls share something that transcends time or if they are nothing more than epoch.” “Epic?” “E-p-o-c-h. It’s a memorable event or period in time.”

“I’ve lived my life in black and white, content with being the shy, quiet wallflower who does nothing but read, just waiting for something exciting to happen to me like it does for the heroines in my books.”

“I’m nobody’s hero, princess. And this isn’t a fairy tale.”

“There’s nothing more rewarding than the risk of falling in love. Sometimes you hit a few roadblocks along the way, but it’s always worth it in the end.”

“He’d always been dangerous. Dangerous to my sanity. Dangerous to my heart. Obviously, none of that mattered. I was drawn to him anyway. Tied.”

“He was an enigma. A veiled mystery. A cliffhanger waiting to be written. Who was I kidding? He was a goddamned mindfuck, that was what he was. And he’d broken my heart one too many times for me to fall into that trap again.”

“We do our best, Ollie. We live and we love. We cherish and we hold.” “We fight with everything we have, even when we know we might lose.” “We do it because we can’t do anything else. Because we love so hard, loving is the only thing we can do.”

“Libby was impulsive and wild and free in everything. The way she thought. The way she lived. The way she loved. If you told her not to do something, she’d do it just to show you that you couldn’t stop her. She was my rebel.”

“He made it hard to breathe. He made it hard to concentrate. He made it hard to remember why I hated him, when all I wanted was to fall into his arms and tell him how much I missed him.”

“I’ve always know I wanted forever with you. Just been waiting for you to get there with me.”“In that moment, it feels like the world momentarily stops spinning, the noise draining into silence around us.”“Sometimes life throws you a curveball and you have to find a way to deal with it.”“That smirk, those soulful eyes, the way his voice feels like a warm blanket protecting me from the outside world. He’s dangerous. He’s the man you’re warned about growing up. The man who can make or break you, flipping your world upside down without even realizing it. The kind of man who comes around once in a lifetime. The man you don’t let go.”

“Love was a messy emotion that didn’t walk a straight line. It worked in waves and loops of ups and downs. It was a screwy emotion that could somehow still exist amidst the ultimate heartbreak and betrayal.”

“Sometimes, all a person needed was another to listen to their uneven heartbeats.”

“I’ve never seen something that made no sense yet complete sense until I laid my eyes on you together.”

“He kissed me slowly, gently, and filled with love. He didn’t have to say it, but I felt our love. I felt it shoot through my body as his lips pressed against mine. Our souls intermixed and our flames were infinite. It was simple, the way we loved…”

“If you only shine light on your flaws, all your perfects will dim.”

“We’re all full of flaws. Hundreds of them. They’re like tiny holes all over our skin. And like your fortune said, sometimes we shine too much light on our own flaws. But there are some people who try to ignore their own flaws by shining light on other people’s to the point that the other person’s flaws become their only focus. They pick at them, little by little, until they rip wide open and that’s all we become to them. One giant, gaping flaw.”

“I have loved you every single second of every day since the moment I laid eyes on you. I love you more now than I did the day I married you. I love you, Quinn. I fucking love you!”

“I promise that I will love you more during the storms than I will love you during the perfect days. I promise to love you more when you’re hurting than when you’re happy. I promise to love you more when we’re poor than when we’re swimming in riches. I promise to love you more when you’re crying than when you’re laughing. I promise to love you more when you’re sick than when you’re healthy.

“I didn’t want you to fall in love with me because of fate,” he says, closing the box. “I wanted you to fall in love with me simply because you couldn’t help yourself.”

“I never got to fall out of love. I just had to move on.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to come home for eleven years. I’ll go anywhere you go.”

“I loved you … You loved me, too, you know,” he says quietly. “It was everything.” I feel as though I’ve been shoved, and push away from the table a little, but he leans in. “Sorry. This is too intense. I’m just terrified of not getting a chance to say it.”

“Well, you’re more, too. You’re my best everything.”

“He just looked at me in a way that made me feel like I was some kind of jigsaw puzzle he couldn’t piece together. Our gazes collided and held. My breath caught. Something….something hot and unwanted flared to life between us.”

“Life without you is like a broken pencil. Pointless.”

“If I had to do it all over, I would. Without a fucking doubt, I would do it again, because the only other option would be that you wouldn’t be standing in front of me–pissed off, but breathing. Alive and so damn beautiful that it kills me a little each time I look at you.”

“Then Brooklyn walked back into my life, and it felt like I’d just woken up from a coma. Everything was louder, more colorful, brighter, newer, and more exciting. I couldn’t wait to wake up every day just to catch a glimpse of her.”

“She made me feel alive again for the first time in years.”

“You’re a pain in my ass. But fighting with you every day for a month has made me happier than getting along with someone else all my life. You drive me crazy, you turn me on more than any woman I’ve ever known, and you make me laugh. You’re stubborn, and smart, and strong and independent…”

“I had fallen for Tucker the first time he grabbed my hand and walked me into the movie theater with our group of friends. To him it was a friendly gesture…to me it made my entire body come to life. I knew then he was going to be my kryptonite.”

“She needed strong partner. Someone sure. Someone as sturdy as the wood slabs in my shop. Not because she couldn’t stand on her own, but because a weaker partner would pull her down. She needed someone to lift her higher. Someone like me?”

“I was falling in love with my grouchy, tormented neighbor. I was falling for a man who was sweet and kind. I was falling in love with a man who had a little magic of his own.”

“I always maintained that line in the sand. There were no lines anymore. I would cross them all. Piper Campbell had broken past all my walls and made me fall in love with her. She’d work her way into my broken heart, filling the black holes with light.”

“Somewhere along the line, you stole my heart, I’m going to steal yours in return. Just wait and see.”

**Now, technically, this book doesn’t release until 2019, but I did read it in 2018 and it just blew my mind. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading and that’s why I went ahead and included it in this years top reads. It was too amazing to not mention.**

“Sometimes you have to leave so you can know what it is you left. You don’t really value something until you’ve lost it.”

“I’d always been big, but something about how fragile she seemed made me feel huge, like I could put my body in front of the storm headed her way and protect her…even if the storm was of my own making.”

“I loved this woman. I would take on armies for her, kill for her, or die for her. There was no grater truth than that, and no other truth that I could give her. Because where she was honest and strong, and kind, I was a liar who had already hurt her in the worst possible way. I had no right to hold her like this, but even worse–I wasn’t going to move a muscle.”

“Because from the moment I saw your face and heard you speak, you were the only one I wanted. You ruined me for anyone else before you ever knew my name.” She ruined me from the second she’d said she regretted writing in pen. She’d had every ounce of my soul when I finished that first letter. “Now that I’ve had one night with you, I don’t want only one. I want them all, and I’m willing to take whatever you want to give me.”

“Hope is good. Feel it. Because you have no idea what’s coming around the corner. You have to take the good when it comes, because the bad isn’t going to give you a choice.”

I’ve read so many amazing books this year, I wish my list could be longer, but these are the ones that have stood out the most to me. For a list of all the books I’ve read this year, head over to GoodReads to see My 2018 Year In Books!

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